Aspects of the invention can relate to an image processing technique which corrects the saturation of color images.
In related art image display devices, when the saturation of the input color image is insufficient, a correcting process can be performed in order to enhance the saturation. Examples of such saturation enhancement process are disclosed in, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2001-218078. According to this process, the maximum saturation is detected from the input color image data, a saturation correction table is made with the maximum saturation as the maximum. In this case, the saturation correction table is set so as to have a curve in which the saturation of the output image data becomes larger than the saturation of the input image data. Therefore, the saturation is corrected by using the saturation correction table. Since the saturation correction table is made after previously detecting the maximum saturation, output after the saturation correction does not exceed the maximum saturation, that is, the color deformation does not occur. However, according to the technique, it is necessary to frequently calculate the maximum saturation from the input color image data. Thus, the calculation amount increases.
Further, in most saturation enhancing processes, the same enhancing process is performed on all of the color components in RGB, YUV color space. However, in the case of performing the same enhancing process on the all of the color components, unbalance between the color components and an unnatural processed image may be obtained.